NIGEL COLE, the British director of 2003’s “Calendar Girls,” was only half joking when he said, “In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.”

His latest movie, “Made in Dagenham,” which opens Friday, is an upbeat, dramatized version of the landmark strike by female factory workers for equal pay at a Ford auto plant in Dagenham, England, in 1968. Sally Hawkins, who won best actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, National Society of Film Critics and Golden Globes for “Happy-Go-Lucky,” stars as the strike’s spunky leader, a composite figure based on several of the real women.

Elizabeth Karlsen, a producer of the film, said it follows in the tradition of “feel-good, empowered working-class movies” like “The Full Monty” (1997) and “Billy Elliot” (2000), “They all are informed by the attitude of we’re not going to sit and take it anymore, “ she said, contrasting those movies with earlier bleak, British angry-young-men films like 1959’s “Look Back in Anger.”

It’s a type of film Hollywood hasn’t much tried to duplicate, especially in recent years when blue-collar characters and their concerns have all but disappeared from mainstream movies.

“In the States everyone aspires to be middle class,” Mr. Cole said, offering a possible explanation for the dearth. “It’s so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you’re going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you’re born working class, you’re going to stay there, although that is changing.”

Interviews with a dozen former studio executives, producers, directors, screenwriters and academics confirmed that, while still admired, films focusing on working-class characters like “Norma Rae” and “Silkwood” are considered so last century. Even 10 years ago “Erin Brockovich” only got the go-ahead after Julia Roberts signed on to star.

“Right now the perception in Hollywood is that what the audience most wants is distraction from their daily lives,” said the veteran producer Douglas Wick, whose credits include “Working Girl” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”

Today if characters aren’t superheroes, teenage wizards or sexy vampires, they’re architects, lawyers, journalists and other professionals or successful entrepreneurs overseeing chic bakeries or floral shops. Those struggling to get by economically are relegated to crime dramas — white-collar crime offers too few opportunities for shootouts and car chases— or to low-budget, independent films like “Frozen River” and “The Wrestler.”

The affluence effect can also be seen in films aimed primarily at African-Americans audiences. But while the main characters are middle class or plump pocketed in films like last spring’s “Just Wright” and Tyler Perry’s popular Madea series, “they tend to have working-class family members with whom they interact,” said Mia Mask, an associate professor of film at Vassar College and author of the 2009 book “Divas on the Screen: Black Women in American Film.”

Mainstream movies are now about “escapism and wish fulfillment,” said Nina Jacobson, a producer and former head of production at the Walt Disney studio. “There’s a schism between independent films representing people who are struggling and glossy studio films that are aspirational.”

Those interviewed often mentioned that the Hollywood studios, as divisions of larger corporations, are under financial pressure to make movies that appeal to a gargantuan, global audience and smaller-scale dramas just don’t cut it.

“Hollywood is risk averse and driven by the numbers,” said Joe Roth, a producer and former top executive at the 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney studios. “

The second prevalent theory is that Americans have always been skittish about class: Nearly everyone in this country self-identifies as middle class and thinks he’s just one good idea or promotion away from becoming a junior Donald Trump.

“Nowadays when a studio is only releasing several dozen films a year and wants the broadest appeal, why would you make films about working-class characters or class conflict?” said Steven J. Ross, a history professor at the University of Southern California and author of the 1998 book “Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America.” “Studios are still in the moneymaking business, not the consciousness-raising biz.”

It wasn’t always so. In another dark economic climate, the Great Depression, studios cranked out both penthouse- and tenement-set tales. “You certainly had a lot of escapist fare and musicals to lift people’s spirits, but you also had powerful films that went straight to the heart of what people were going through at that time,” said the documentary director Michael Moore, who admiringly name-checked “The Grapes of Wrath,” the comedies of Will Rogers and the directors Preston Sturges and Frank Capra.

A recent rare successful Hollywood movie set in a lower-class milieu was “The Town,” a crime thriller directed by and starring Ben Affleck. “I’m interested in working-class stories because my mother is a teacher, and my father is a bartender, so I can personally identify with it,” he said. “Those stories are closest to who we are as Americans.”

His self-described “sneaky” recipe for success: hybridization. Using as examples “Good Will Hunting,” which he wrote with Matt Damon; “Gone Baby Gone,” which he directed; and “The Town,” which he helped write, Mr. Affleck said, “If Matt’s janitor character wasn’t a genius in ‘Good Will Hunting,’ if there weren’t a crime-mystery aspect to ‘Gone Baby Gone,’ and if there weren’t a bank robbery element to ‘The Town,’ I don’t know that those films would have been made.”

Finally, the current paucity of working-class characters may sometimes come down to plain old attitude. Courtney Hunt, the writer and director of 2008’s “Frozen River,” remembers the indignant reaction of a wealthy potential investor after he’d read her screenplay about a heroine who becomes a smuggler to stave off having her trailer home repossessed.